Norwegian Musings and Polish Thoughts

I can’t help but wonder how many nuclear physicists get up out of bed each morning and ask themselves whether they are nuclear physicists.

If it looks like a goose, honks like a goose, and nips like a goose, it's probably a goose. Geese on the Snake by Steve Henderson

Granted, if one is a nuclear physicist, one has concrete evidence of the fact – education, background, job title, and hours of working each day with whatever it is that nuclear physicists work with – but an artist has a few concrete pieces of evidence as well:

Paint; canvas; brushes; paper; pencils; clay; some sort of easel, palette, or workspace – all of which are jumbled together somehow to create a painting, sculpture, piece of jewelry, or some other product that others look at and call “art.”

So it would only make sense to call the person who made it an “artist.”

Ah, but nothing in life is simple, and many people – some of whom are nuclear physicists – work at a day job and do art on the side, in the evenings, on the weekends, in place of eating lunch – and while what they produce looks like a painting or a sculpture or a piece of jewelry, they torture themselves by asking all the time,

“Am I an artist?”

“Am I a real artist?”

Some people ask themselves this so much that they stop producing whatever artwork they have been producing, until they can get an answer to the question.

But to some extent, does it really matter?

And whose definition of “artist” are you using anyway?

This is what I recommend: go ahead, keep asking yourself the question if you insist, but don’t stop creating whatever it is that you create, and don’t let the question fill your mind and crowd out ideas for your next piece of work.

2 Responses to The question that NEVER goes away

Carolyn, I wanted to thank you for your positive, uplifting and supportive articles that you send to Fine Art Views. They teach me many things as an artist and encourage me to "press onward." God gives many gifts and you have been blessed, and are a blessing. Thanks, Carla

Carla: Thank you for your gracious, uplifting encouragement -- It gives a smile to my day, and a light of joy inside my heart.

I read a book once in which the character took time to look at what another person was doing, and comment favorably upon it. "It caused him no pain to do this," the narrator observed, "and provided much good. Why then, did not more people do the same?"